Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (FSG Classics)

---

Stephen Poole Fine Books. Selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. Jacket design by Guy Fleming. The contents were selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, whose lifelong friendship with the author originated at the start of her literary career. The fourteenth and concluding piece is the long essay she wrote as an introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann. On the other hand, she knew that those concentrations of experience and invention have their place in real contexts, literary, regional and religious, that could and should be examined and discussed.

She had a gift for this, too. Her papers not only complement her stories but are valuable and seminal in themselves. The modest confidence with which she spoke was justified.. BBYZUY 1st edition 1st printing - some wear and tear to dust jacket now in mylar cover some staining to edges of cover - gift inscription inside front cover - some staining to page edge - otherwise binding strong contents clean - enjoy. Twice Sold Tales Condition: Previous owner name to front pastedown.

Couple tiny tears to jacket.. Mystery and Manners - Occasional Prose. Selected, edited and introduced by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. Very good indeed in very good dustwrapper a little creased at the edges. Peter Ellis bookseller Published: Used book in good condition. Has wear to the cover and pages.

Contains some markings such as highlighting and writing. Used - Very Good. Ships from Reno, NV. Great condition for a used book! Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! Better World Books Condition: Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. The dust jacket is missing. The covers are smudged with some shelf wear. The pages bear some underlining but are quite readable. Book Lovers Warehouse Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Russell Books Ltd Condition: At her death in , O'Connor left behind a body of unpublished essays and lectures as well as a number of critical articles that had appeared in scattered publications during her too-short lifetime.

The keen writings comprising Mystery and Manners, selected and edited by O'Connor's lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, are characterized by the directness and simplicity of the author's style, a fine-tuned wit, understated perspicacity, and profound faith. The book opens with "The King of the Birds," her famous account of raising peacocks at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia. This bold and brilliant essay-collection is a must for all readers, writers, and students of modern American literature. Very Good In Dustjacket. Remainder Mark on Bottom Edge. Translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder.

Jacket photograph of birds and sky by Eugene Kuo. Construction work in an expanding Reykjavik uncovers a shallow grave. Years before, this part of the city was all open hills, and Erlendur and his team hope this is a typical Icelandic missing person scenario; perhaps someone once lost in the snow, who has lain peacefully buried for decades.

But things are never that simple. While Erlendur struggles to hold together the crumbling fragments of his own family, his case unearths many other tales of family pain. The hills have more than one tragic story to tell: Few people are still alive who can tell the story, but even secrets taken to the grave cannot remain hidden forever.

Alive with tension and atmosphere, and disturbingly real, this is an outstanding continuation of the Reykjavik Murder Mysteries. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January O'Connor cannot need an introduction, and who could find the words anyway? One of the most significant and powerful writers of this century here addresses fiction: It is as if the writer creates the deep space where the reader may fall or may not.

But what is amazing about Flannery O'Connor, and why she is such a good teacher, is that this mystery and depth is always attained through an incredible power of seeing the concrete and the particular. The habit of art, she says, is the habit of seeing. She saw life singly through the binoculars of the specific and the universal so that the reader could see as much of mystery as he or she was capable of seeing.

Apr 02, Lee rated it really liked it. O'Connor sometimes seems to me like a didactic pedantic generalizer, but in general I like her. My reaction to her stories and essays seems consistently polarized -- either I love a story or essay, fly through it, swim in it, revel in it, fully engage with it, or else it closes down and becomes an impenetrable thicket of text, dull, inflexible, too parochial for this fancy northeastern prep school kid.

In this collection, the essays about Catholic writers and the memoir about the little girl who died at age 9 were not accessible to this 21st century pagan literary pantheist, to be exact. In general throughout I jibed with her when she talked about the anti-scientific mysteries of fiction writing, the mysticism of it, but when she deploys a lot of "musts" and "shoulds" when talking about fiction, although at one point she does say there're no rules as long as you can pull it off although few pull much off , she loses me, since I guess I just don't respond to what seems to me like this sort of mild-mannered effectively totalitarian sensibility reminded me of Marilynne Robinson somewhat , especially when it comes to art.

Too often for me seemed intellectually dualistic good vs evil in a way I don't believe accurately reflects what it's like to be alive. For an engaging story, an evil obstacle a dragon! In general, I enjoyed reading most of this, even if I didn't agree with it all, to such an extent that I give it four stars even if I skimmed the last few essays.

Awesome to see where so many of those writing workshop old standbys come from: In fact, so many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence.

We want competence, but competence by itself is deadly. What is needed is the vision to go with it, and you do not get this from a writing class. View all 3 comments. Jan 31, Cindy Rollins rated it really liked it Shelves: After reading this I don't have to wonder what Flannery would think of modern Christian fiction. This book makes me feel less guilty about all those times I made fun of the Christian fiction catalogs on my old blog. The book is the collected writing of Flannery on writing from various sources. I say Flannery because I love her so much and she is my friend.

If you truly want to at least try to probe the idea of the art of fiction this is a must-read. I secret 4 stars for most people, 5 for writers. I secretly think I will not be a writer until I write fiction and yet when I read this I am pretty sure I don't have the gift. The scientist has the habit of science; the artist, the habit of art. A lesser-known gem of writing advice, it is bursting with wisdom--really specific stuff, told in this sort of deadpan sarcastic voice.

It makes for wonderful reading. I copied so many passages my notes are almost as long as the book.

She explains symbols and meaning and drama. She has opinions on education and poverty and religion. Together, this creates a kind of unique philosophy, and gives her advice deep and distinctive meaning. Here are three quotes, all about looking and seeing: Art is the habit of the artist; and habits have to be rooted deep in the whole personality. They have to be cultivated like any other habit, over a long period of time, by experience; and teaching any kind of writing is largely a matter of helping the student develop the habit of art.

I think this is more than just a discipline, although it is that; I think it is a way of looking at the created world and of using the senses so as to make them find as much meaning as possible in things. I dislike so many things about Flannery O'Connor -- her dogmatic Catholicism, her venom toward the faithless world and other would-be writers -- and yet all the same I'm in love with her.

I'm not the only one; what's wrong with us?

Покупки по категориям

O'Connor's the mean girl in your writers' group: My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. The idea of being a I dislike so many things about Flannery O'Connor -- her dogmatic Catholicism, her venom toward the faithless world and other would-be writers -- and yet all the same I'm in love with her. The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.

Her ultimate aim is to preach Catholic dogma and further the glory of God. But what remarkable talent, that reading her fiction alone none of us would have guessed it. At least half of the essays in this book are about being Catholic, and would have been helpful to me when I was studying literature at a religious university.

In one class we watched an interview where Mormon leader Boyd K. Packer, who also dabbles in painting, asserts that the role of the artist isn't to document the world with all its nastiness, but improve and perfect it.

In contrast, O'Connor says the writer has to write what he or she sees, and "To look at the worst will be for him no more than an act of trust in God. Or as O'Connor writes elsewhere: Non leggo i libri sulla scrittura per imparare a scrivere, non sono un'aspirante scrittrice. Ci sono due o tre nodi su cui si regge l'intero libro, che risulta una costruzione coerente e solida. Per Fla Non leggo i libri sulla scrittura per imparare a scrivere, non sono un'aspirante scrittrice.

Nel Sud religioso, ma protestante, la cattolica Flannery trova il terreno ideale per far fiorire la sua narrativa.

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (FSG Classics)

Nov 03, Taka rated it really liked it Shelves: I will respond to her book in two parts, first from the standpoint of a teacher and second from that of a fiction writer. One of the tips that may be useful in teaching creative writing is her insistence that fiction must, before all else, be concrete and appeal to the senses.

One of my students likes to write abstractly because, he says, it will allow different people to see what they want to see. After a disastrous class on characterization where I presented the tools of characterization to my students at the end of the class, I decided to do another lesson on the topic. And this time, I gave them the tools first and went over the story paragraph by paragraph, reminding them to keep the tools in mind and asking them what they learned about the characters in each paragraph. I also had them build an interesting character using the tools, and I hope that class was a lot more successful in teaching my students the tools than the first one.

And sadly, some of those elements—especially flattery—remain in graduate-level workshops. This notwithstanding, I found most of her essays to be germane to me as a writer. First, I was inspired by her definition of fiction: Second, something I have been thinking about a lot lately is the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind in writing, and she drives home the idea that jibes with my experience as reflected in my analogy of a sculpture in response to Madison Smartt Bell: Elsewhere, she makes the point that too much competent alone is harmful because you need vision to go with it, and vision is something you can get only from the unconscious mind.

Each story presents its peculiar difficulties and I have to learn how to render those into credible scenes. Also, because technique comes after the first draft, finishing the first draft is always a learning experience. This way of thinking about my fascination with natural disasters made me realize that although they have never been just ends in themselves, I could do so much more with them. This was a valuable realization. Finally, her remark about the relationship between craft and depth really struck a chord in me: This last bit came to me almost as a shock because it seemed to me that all I have been doing is to get to that point, but, I realized, not past it.

In other words, I was going deep enough. So perhaps the biggest gain from reading Mystery and Manners is that it made me want to approach the revision process with a whole lot more artistic rigor and vision.

Our Frequent Buyer Card

Mar 12, Matthew rated it really liked it. O'Connor averred that she wrote as she did because she was Catholic, and that, as a Catholic, she couldn't write any other way. She may have most readily identified herself this way, but this collection is proof positive that she was first and foremost a writer. As a critic, she was an apostle of Henry James, deeply unsentimental indeed, a hilariously unapologetic misopedist , an enemy of excess, a believer in humility "the first product of self-knowledge" , and, above all, gloriously quotable O'Connor averred that she wrote as she did because she was Catholic, and that, as a Catholic, she couldn't write any other way.

As a critic, she was an apostle of Henry James, deeply unsentimental indeed, a hilariously unapologetic misopedist , an enemy of excess, a believer in humility "the first product of self-knowledge" , and, above all, gloriously quotable example: My opinion is that they don't stifle enough. Her tone in the more unvarnished religious material is mostly rote, especially compared to the hagiographic reverence with which she refers to Faulkner and James. It should be conceded that this can't be said of The Habit of Being , which contains innumerable pages of lengthy, fervid correspondences with priests, fellow parishioners, converts, etc.

But even impassioned as she sometimes was when her primary concerns were Catholic and as compelling as her explanation for the Catholic novelist's poverty of imagination is she was certainly never as funny as when she wrote about writing. Sep 18, Cassy rated it liked it Recommended to Cassy by: Creative Writing Professor R. It is divided into six parts. A Short Story — very entertaining. I am glad the editors included this story among all the essays.

I had never read any of her short stories or novels. This established my respect for her talent. Southern Literature — fairly interesting, although maybe obsolete. I had not really realized that there was such a genre, which is pretty sad since I was born and raised in her Georgia and have dutifully read Faulkner et al.

Writing Fiction — the most helpful section by far. I actually used three different colored highlighters to mark it up. There were lots of quotable material and things to ponder when writing. Teaching Literature — more interesting that I expected. She had some very valid points. Yet, this part was obviously more applicable to a teacher than a writer. Religious Novelists — long and uninteresting.

There were some good nuggets hidden here and there, but I mostly skimmed it. A Book Introduction — pleasant to read and well-chosen to end the book. I feel like I would have gotten more out this book if I had read it in connection with a class — taking notes, heavy thinking, writing papers, and discussing with others.

I would recommend it whole-heartedly to a serious writer, yet flash a caution light for a causal reader. Jun 23, Elizabeth Andrew rated it it was amazing Shelves: Flannery O'Connor is a fiction writer, I told myself; what could she teach me about spiritual memoir writing? And yet some of these are the best essays I've ever read about addressing the spiritual life in prose. If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.

The point O'Connor emphasizes repeatedly is that only a writer's adherence to reality, in its sensory, concrete details, can make the supernatural apparent. The universal is in the particular; the supernatural is in the natural. But where she challenges me is when she discusses the skepticism of modern readers, and how a writer of faith must at times exaggerate to make his or her point: The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.

How do we do this in memoir, or essays? I'm curious to explore this. I also love O'Connor's perspective that her faith, rather than diminish the terrain of her content or the breadth of her perspective, actually demands more of her craft. Good writing addresses the farthest reaches of mystery, O'Connor says, and faith requires us to live in relationship with this mystery in every moment--or, more to her point, with every mundane detail of our days. In a literary world so often devoid of believers, O'Connor is a must-read.

Jan 28, David Withun rated it it was amazing Shelves: In this collection of essays and talks by O'Connor, the author explores such subjects as writing, the teaching of literature in schools and colleges, the peculiarities of the Catholic writer, and the peculiarities of the Southern writer. Particularly fascinating in the pieces contained in this volume is her discussion of the "grotesque"--a term and literary device with which her work is often associated.

For those wishing to gain access to a greater understanding of O'Connor's fiction, this is t In this collection of essays and talks by O'Connor, the author explores such subjects as writing, the teaching of literature in schools and colleges, the peculiarities of the Catholic writer, and the peculiarities of the Southern writer. For those wishing to gain access to a greater understanding of O'Connor's fiction, this is the place to start.

I went 1-for-3 on Flannery last week, and as you can see, this was the one that spoke a lot of my language. On community; on place; on writing and mystery. Her essays are something ferocious. Jan 03, Autumn rated it it was amazing. This collection is an excellent summary of Flannery's theology and general worldview. She's a wonderful thinker and this posthumous collection of essays and lectures show that.

It has been said that the things said in this book are repetitive and they are in places , but to me it shows what was important to her.

863,14 RUB

She thought those topics so central to who she was that she repeated them wherever she spoke. Flannery O'Connor era magnifica, non ci sono altre parole. I've never seen a collection of nonfiction essays start so beautifully and diminish in readability so steadily. By the end of this collection I'd lost respect for a writer I'd previously been quite fond of, because by the end of the collection she'd been flat-out and pretentiously preaching to me for a solid pages. I really didn't like the way some of these essays were written, but more to the point, I didn't like the way this collection was organized and shared.

I'm chocking that up to bein I've never seen a collection of nonfiction essays start so beautifully and diminish in readability so steadily. I'm chocking that up to being entirely the wrong collection of essays for me, and placing equal blame on myself for choosing it solely based on its cover when we visited the charming bookstore in Faulkner's once-home in New Orleans this past November, and on the fact that it was curated posthumously by two of O'Connor's closest friends.

I've always enjoyed Flannery O'Connor's writing style. Her stories have such punch and depth and she always struck me as someone with heaps of wit and charm that inevitably dripped into the short stories of hers I read in high school and during my undergraduate lit studies. True to that known form, the first essay is about raising peacocks on her family's farm in rural Georgia, and it's so vibrant and funny and has so many elements that remind me of my favorite naturalist writers.

Likewise, some of her essays on fiction and fiction readers are honest and funny, equal parts brusque and charming. Some of her lines really spoke to me. Likewise, many of them feel equal parts unfinished and wholly repetitive, which again, isn't so much O'Connor's fault so much as it is those responsible for this collection's curation and publication.

Sep 29, Heather rated it it was amazing. Who knew an isolated lupus-suffering hyper-religious Catholic in the smack middle of Georgia could be so hot damn funny!

• Golf Apparel for Women - Ladies Golf Clothes
• Edades de la luz, Las (Solaris ficción) (Spanish Edition)
• ENGLISH FOR TOURISTS (English for Speakers of Foreign Languages Book 1)
• Exiles on Palm Canyon Drive (The Sasha DAngelo Files Book 1)
• How I Organize My Money: The Budgeting Secrets of a Lazy Do-it-Yourselfer
• Mahatma Gandhi (Critical Lives)
• Au nom du père. Lenfance perdue (French Edition)